Watering

Question: what does a plumber and a gardener have in common?

Without getting too cute, the answer is water..

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I water (or not) the plants in my garden and when that spark of opportunity arrived during a converstion at a networking gathering, it seemed that Your Local Plumbing Company (@plumbinglocal) and Auntie Planty (@THEauntieplanty) were a match made in heaven - an excellent bit of collaboration to get the best use out of what is rapidly becoming a precious resource.

We've had such funny weather lately - hot one minute, very hot the next and a deluge of rain the next. The sad fact is that when soil dries out, it's extremely difficult to re-hydrate it - you might think that the rain will have fixed the problem but not so. You would be shocked at how ineffective a good shower of rain has on dry soil. The secret is to keep it in a moist (but not water-logged state) so that any water delivered can travel freely from soil particle to soil particle with the greatest of ease.

And so the plumber and the hortie hatched a plan to deliver timed and measured amounts of water to my thirsty plants from a rather delapidated tap at the side of the house. The result is a simple system that suits my garden perfectly, and it contained all the elements needed for my albeit haphazard planting schemes. The plumber plumbed and the hortie arranged the micro-tubes for maximum effect. BTW I got a new tap into the bargain..

And so a new product is born, it's flexible as I can add on when new plants arrive in the garden, and it hasn't cost an arm and a leg. We don't know what to call it yet, so for the moment it's just called AP/YLPC garden irrigation - bit of a mouthful and I'm sure doesn't quite have the marketing pizzazz needed, but it works, and if you want to know how, just ask by clicking here.

The next cute move is to harness the water butts into the system - but this might take some fresh ingenuity!